The Evolution of The Haunted Mansion

Disneyland's Haunted Mansion is widely regarded as one of the largest dark attractions in the world using a lot of different illusions and at the time of its opening with innovative technology, it is no wonder that the attraction has managed to survive so long, but What most people don't know is that the attraction we see today is very different from what it was supposed to be just 3 years before it opened and how the very idea of ​​what the attraction would be like evolved countless times over. throughout the 12 years he spent there. development, so with this video I wanted to explore the history of the attractions before they opened and really find out how it went from being a traditional 1950s ghost house to one of Disneyland's most iconic attractions to date, so to do it, let's take the whole story the whole story.

From its inception, the oldest version of what we know as the Haunted Mansion dates back to 1951, but the drawing by Disney artist Harper Goff dates back to the days before Disneyland even existed as an idea when Walt was interested in opening a smaller Mickey Mouse park in front of his studio in Burbank, some of whose early sketches were made by Gogh. The first piece of concept art involved a church cemetery and a creepy old house on a hill overlooking them at the time. was nothing more than a basic idea for some kind of

haunted

house attraction, there were no real plans beyond that, of course, as the Mickey Mouse Park idea grew and eventually became Disneyland in Anaheim, the concept of the

haunted

house now emerged ready to be at the end of the park's Main Street, Dale Hennessy designed a new version of the house that still looked very similar to Golf's original design at this time without the attached church and cemetery.

This new Main Street house could also be seen in the first drill. A revision of the park's design in 1953 by Herb Ryman, but at this point in its development, the

mansion

was nothing more than a simple creepy-looking house and considering the fact that Disneyland was going to open in just two years, new plans were created for Main Street. Now designed without the haunted house because it simply wouldn't be ready in time for a while after Disneyland's grand opening in 1955, the house was still planned to be a main street attraction, just now a bit behind the rest of the street in one more creepy way.

An isolated branch, but none of these ideas were officially put to paper, it would not be until around 1956 that the house saw another design, this time by Sam McKim. Initially he only has a very basic sketch, then he developed the idea with a little more. Detailed version of the building that now looked much more dilapidated than any of the previous versions. This new idea was also created around the same time that Disney was considering expanding the park with its first new land called New Orleans Square, a tribute to reality. New Orleans, but with a greater focus on its historical aspects, specifically its pirate tradition, which would be represented by a wax gallery of famous pirates, the same idea that would later evolve into the Pirates of the Caribbean boat ride, but that is yours. story With those plans in mind, McKim's haunted house redesign was now going to be part of this new expansion located on the far left of the land near the Jungle Cruise waters and with a more permanent location now established for the attraction.

Work finally began on what would actually be inside the house. Actually, the first Imagineer who can be credited with coming up with ideas for the haunted

mansion

scene is Ken Anderson, who walled himself in and was put in charge of the project in 1957. He was initially assigned the task of creating some kind of plot. for the attraction and ended up creating a couple. Anderson envisioned the ghost house as a ride-on attraction where groups of 40 guests would be guided through the house by a tour guide who would go through different scenes that would show ghostly effects if you then drew a bunch of them. of concept art to accompany this story along with an actual design that we will use to get a better idea of ​​the original route.

The story begins outside the mansion, where you cross a small courtyard and return to the house where After entering, you fight yourself in the portrait gallery, now accompanied by your tour guide named Beauregard, who explains the history of the mansion to you. and that its previous owner, Bartholomew, was a retired sea captain who was rumored to actually be an X pirrett without him or his wife Priscilla. Eventually, they both disappeared under mysterious circumstances, the house they lived in was said to be haunted, from there a hinged bookshelf would open revealing a secret path to the next scenes, including a pirate on a table, which would likely have been the revelation that Bartholomew was in fact the deadly pirate captain Gore and the next scene after the titled wife on the chest where we would have likely seen Priscilla discover the truth about Gore.

The tour guide also explains at this point that Gore killed her once he found out about her past out of fear that she might tell the rest of the town that now, in the back of the house, we can look out a large window at a swampy swamp and seeing the ghost of a Gore ship in the distance; the next scene would have included the captain sleeping. in a bed with our tour guide now explaining that he doesn't sleep much since his wife shows up as a ghost of Priscilla and Gore shoots her, you would finally walk into a room and look up to see that Gore was finally hanged. himself after years of being pursued by his wife, while this story was the strongest of Anderson's early ideas, there were also some other miscellaneous ones, as in those same floor plans you can see something labeled as hands, this in It was actually related to another of his concepts in which the recurring characters throughout the house would be a hairy arm, a disembodied arm that would reach out and occasionally grab the tour guide and guests.

At one point there were some plans to perhaps tie the arm into the story of the attraction being the cause of Priscilla's Death, but that idea was eventually scrapped when Andersen came up with Captain Gore's backstory over the next few months. . Anderson's concepts evolved a bit more and expanded with new scene ideas, all of which then culminated in another new design for the ride now. Much larger than the original, this house featured all sorts of new scenes, such as a grand entrance hall with a creepy spiral staircase, a revised portrait gallery, a much larger cemetery scene that was visible through a window and a large hall/dance hall with a ghost playing the piano, but none of these were really tied into a real, cohesive story like before, mainly due to the fact that at the time Wall suggested two more ideas that Ken was now trying. to incorporate in some way, one of which was related to the 1949 film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. toad in which you would see the Headless Horseman somewhere in the attraction and also another link to the lone ghost from the classic Disney cartoon, an idea that you can still glimpse in some of the house designs, but ultimately, While neither of these ideas are really stuck at this time, he was also facing the capacity problem with Disneyland attendance rapidly increasing in the late 1950s, a ride attraction would have been especially difficult to achieve given the fact that that doesn't move visitors through it like a trip would, so Kent began tossing around some ideas for a transportation system that would transport people around the house at a set pace to get more people through. hour.

This also sparked another attraction idea in which Walt Disney purchased a real house called Blood Mere Manor from New Orleans and moved it from Louisiana to Disneyland in hopes of repairing it, only to discover that the house was actually haunted and that Any repairs made to it were undone by angry spirits that same night, leaving a decrepit building. and a ghost-filled mansion right in the middle of the park that you could explore. This new story coincided with a redesign by Andersen based on the real-life Shipley Lydecker house. The building was now in a classic pre-war style with an overgrown front garden and boarded up windows, Sam McKim turned this sketch into a full color painting and presented it to Walt, who surprisingly rejected the idea of ​​a dilapidated house , rather than wanting the mansion to appear pristine and fit in better with the rest of the New Orleans plaza.

Not long after, Ken ended up leaving the project entirely in 1958 to help with the animation of the next Sleeping Beauty film, but development of the mansion wouldn't necessarily stop there, as a couple of other Imagineers, Roley Crump and Gale Gracie, they were still working hard. Creating all the effects for the attraction with a rough idea of ​​what the history of the mansion would be based on the concept art Andersen left behind, they were now working on ways to bring those same scenes to life, particularly using a century-old theatrical effect. called Pepper's Ghost, which in practice is basically the reflection of an offstage figure in a piece of glass, creating a transparent version of that figure that looked quite convincing if presented as a ghost, in fact, they had been playing with it in model form for some years. and since Anderson's Captain Gore concept was generally thought to be the final story of the run at the time it was filmed, Yale began toying with that idea in the process, tweaking the backstory a bit and also creating a new quite elaborate show seen using Pepper's Ghost that I.

We'll let him explain now, we also had a story about the ship's captain who had supposedly drowned at sea and who had murdered his wife before he went to sea and she, she and he bricked her up in the chimney, so we We connected this whole thing where we had this skeleton behind the fireplace because she was offstage, you know, mirrored and she had a big sort of "it's not a sheet but a piece of real, transparent material" over her, so we brought the It shines on the captain who was also offstage. We actually had him in a saucepan of water and we had a shower spill on him, so all of a sudden, in the middle of this room, you saw this old ship captain.

Here and then, all of a sudden, water starts dripping out of him and he had seaweed on him and everything and then you saw the ghost of his wife behind the bricks light up and then she screamed and came out with her arms and then they both disappeared and it was creation It was scenes like that that really solidified them. Gracie is the real brains behind the house effects. While she was originally just trying to bring Anderson's concept art to life through different technologies, she eventually started her own. sort of experimentation and in turn ended up generating a lot of new ideas for the mansion's story, like creating frozen shadows of guests on the walls with luminescent paint, making talking skulls equipped with microphones so they could talk to people and even discovering that he could make multiples of a ghost by projecting it onto a disco ball, all sorts of amazing little effects, and throughout the history of the mansion, yes, surprisingly prolific when it came to creating special effects, as he ended up making dozens of them during their time on the project, but we will. delving into some of them later, when 1961 rolled around, Disney was pretty sure the attraction was finished with most of its story already created by Ken and Yale's effects now in practice, all it would take would be some final preparations. before.

They were able to begin construction and have it ready in 1963, a date they were so sure of that it appeared in several visitor brochures at the time. From there, Marvin Davis redrew a cleaner final version of the Anderson mansion and construction began shortly thereafter. the facade of the house along with the rest of the New Orleans plaza in 1962, but they would eventually run into a problem at the upcoming 1964 World's Fair. You might be wondering how an animation studio like ours got into the animation business. World's Fair and frankly, I've often wondered about that as Disney is now involved in the fair by signing a decree on various attractions so a big part of the marriage was now focused on developing those attractions and with a date limit established in 1963, almost all Disneyland projects were put on hold.

However, over the next few years, since construction had already begun on the exterior of the mansion, that part was completed in 1963, of course, the actual exhibition building where theAll of his scenes weren't there yet and the house itself was just sitting there. empty for the next two years, as the Imagineers were still working on finishing all of the World's Fair attractions, it wouldn't be until after the fair was over that work would resume on the mansion and with Walt eager to finally finish the ghost who is now 13 years old. At home, I would put another animator-turned-Imagineer Marc Davis on the project partly to reimagine some of Anderson's older ideas, but also to come up with new stories for all the purposes of Yael Gracie towards the beginning of the era of Davis at the attraction.

Say that most of his sketches were actually just a rehash of Anderson's old concepts, whether it be a new version of the tour guide Beauregard who is now imagined as an old butler or even his character of the real Captain Gore, all of his sketches They really built on the old one. idea of ​​the tour with even the semi-retired Harry the arm making a brief return that was forgotten again just as quickly; It wouldn't be until some time later that the brand like Yale broke away from the old ride stories and began creating original things that would eventually take the attraction in a completely new direction, but at that time Walt Disney was still very much involved. into the project and was also determined to keep it as a walk-on attraction without having to turn it from a ride into an attraction.

As they were doing with Pirates of the Caribbean in his mind, keeping the house as something you walked through was still integral. from experience, so when the plans for the houses building were drawn up around 1964, that was still the idea and since capacity was still probably going to be an issue, they plan to create two identical tours in that same building that were side by side, obviously allowing twice as many people to pass through it per hour, was around the same time that we can start to see some elements of The Mansion finale start to appear, one of which is the real name Haunted Mansion , which was now what the attraction was officially known as and Mark Davis is the teacher in charge of our house of illusions or what we call it a haunted mansion. and supernatural, along with that we also get to see the first appearance of the attractions opening scene, the stretching room, what does it tell you about this here, well this is a stretching room for long meetings initially devised by Yale Gracie As a way to attract people from the front of the mansion to its display building, the effect is actually quite simple: guests would enter through the front of the house, which itself is just the shell of a giant elevator. , they are then taken down to the basement level of the park, exit the room and walk through a hallway that conveniently passes under the Disneyland railroad tracks and into the main show building and this is where Mark Davis really started to make an impact by taking what was originally just a necessary transportation system and turning it into its own setting specifically with the creation.

Of these elongated portrait paintings that elongated with the room revealing the characters to be in more sinister situations, of course they all had a slight sense of humor, a real staple of Mark Davis' work and some that could be viewed with enough intensity and everything. his art for Pirates of the Caribbean, where most of the drawings featured jokes and were generally quite light-hearted, and he also worked on the back hallway to the exhibition building, now turning it into a portrait gallery, an idea that probably came from one of the original tour designs where a gallery was supposed to precede the rest of the attraction and this is also where you can see another of his contributions, the changing portrait, a painting that would transform into something a little scarier the longer you were in the room.

During his first few months on the project, Davis mostly stuck to creating different versions of all of these portraits, really just trying out a bunch of random subjects and hoping to find a few that would fit as he designed the look of both rooms, but he wasn't just one was throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall while Roli Crump in the Department of Illusions was also taking the mansion in his own very strange direction in the same way that many of the other Imagineers on the project did. Raleigh began putting some of his own ideas for the mansion to paper by drawing a bunch of strange pictures that included things like an aquarium with ghost fish chairs that would get up and talk to people and sentient gypsy carts if it wasn't obvious enough. .

Rollie was really taking a risk with everything. These drawings introduced a distinctive surreal quality that no one else really knew what to do with, yet he continued making new sketches and eventually presented some models to Walt, who at first also had no idea what to do with. them, but then they came up with something called the Museum of the Weird, a working exhibit is the mansion's back exhibit where people could spend some time looking at Raleigh's collection of strange artifacts, which really allowed him to go crazy with all of them. his creations he continued to make and with all these sudden changes occurred and there were now new people working on the attraction.

The concept of his backstory began to change little from the original Captain Gore story, which everyone was still loosely clinging to, to something a little vaguer, as described by Walt Disney here, where Let's Meet the Ghost . This is a small scale model of the 15 land areas. You've seen it many times, but we don't have the ghosts there yet, but we are outside collecting the ghosts that we are going to bring. ghosts from all over the world and we are also making it very attractive. I hope they know they're going to want to come and stay at Disneyland, so we're going to put cobwebs on the walls and guarantee squeaky doors and pores now.

No one is entirely sure where this idea of ​​ghosts from around the world came from, but it is believed to be inspired by the recent advancement of audio animatronics, a technology that Disney really took to the next level during the World's Fair by creating one of its The most realistic figures so far with Abraham Lincoln in a show that was so impressive and popular that it prompted the Pirates wax museum that was developing a Disneyland to now turn it into an attraction with this new type of figures and not wanting the Haunted Mansion would be technologically eclipsed.

Because of that attraction, it would now also include animatronics that would be combined with the same old illusions that Yale had been working on, plus, by generalizing the story beyond the ship's captain, the mention could include a lot of different characters, something that Mark Davis took it completely. I take advantage by drawing some of the new artistic concepts that now feature everything from historical figures like Caesar to ancient Egyptian mummies and even Rasputin, who would have had his own changing portrait and was the creation of these first conceptual pieces that reflect the ghosts of everyone's concept that really started Marc Davis down the path of creating more characters for the mansion that were just random, some of which were humorous sight gags like the ones he made for the pirates and some of which were simply various creepy or supernatural situations in this point.

He had pretty much abandoned most of Anderson's original ideas and Marc Davis was now forging a sort of new path for the mansion theme through all these different drawings. Of course, that's not to say he didn't borrow a couple of ideas in the process, but before any All of these new concepts could be presented to Walt for final approval; Unfortunately, he would pass away on December 15, 1966, leaving the project and all participants in a sort of state of limbo for a while with no clear path forward, until 1967, when Disney had finally finished and opened Pirates of the Caribbean, allowing most of the Imagineers from that project transferred to the mansion, finally infusing the attraction with much-needed new blood, some of the most notable characters, including people like Claude Coats, who did the entire set. and background work for the pirates and the former Atencio, whose story he addressed and wrote the actual script for the voyage and with the husband's new management wanting to complete the voyage as soon as possible, almost all of Imagineering was now included in the project one way or another. which resulted in a veritable avalanche of new ideas and a particularly interesting one coming from Claude Coats.

Claude felt that the mansion should be a truly terrifying experience and live up to people's expectations of what a haunted mansion would be, taking it in the direction Davis wanted mostly humorous scenarios, it just looked too much like pirates. and it wouldn't give the house its own unique feel. The mansion Coates imagined was dark and sinister, with haunted cemeteries and dusty abandoned attics, not scenes in which he was meant to laugh at something. Davis obviously didn't agree with leading to one of the most famous splits in imaginary history with people on both sides of the project debating which tone of the House should be fun or scary, causing even more ideas to now arise, being the artist Dorothy Redman one of the first to try to combine them all, representing Claude's changing atmosphere and the darker scenes and at the same time leaving room for lightness or a Mark Davis concept could easily fit even trying to incorporate some of that surrealism that so much Roley Crump liked him, but beyond the theme of attractions.

There was an even bigger problem to deal with, as they had yet to discover a real solution to the attraction capacity problem and although the double ride idea had barely worked before Disneyland's annual attendance was higher than ever by late 60s. really cancels out the likelihood of that or even Ken Anderson's dolly idea actually working, so the Imagineers turn to a ride system that they already knew were reliable boats and, no matter how crazy While it may seem like the idea made sense using the same Pirates system, it wouldn't. It only allows for more capacity, but it also gives the mansion a new theme with scenes now set in the flooded remains of a half-submerged abandoned house right in the middle of this creepy-looking swamp, something that fits the larger theme quite well. wide of Louisiana in the square of New Orleans.

In some ways it represents the opposite of all the fancy shops and restaurants in that area by having this dark ghostly presence and the surrounding swamps, but this concept was quickly abandoned with the creation of the Omni Mover transportation system, a new type of transportation. which moved continuously on a track that gives the mansion the necessary capacity while also distinguishing it from pirates and keeping everything dry with a reliable transportation system in place. exit n Co started putting together all these loose ideas that everyone had discarded and started giving them shape. type of plot that decides which scenes to include in its shot based on the most recurring ideas.

Obvious things that have been around since Andersen's time, like a ballroom graveyard and a séance scene, would be included, especially since each of those ideas had revitalized order. of endless doors and hallways based on some of the more ethereal ideas we saw from people like Roley and Dorothy, plus some of the old characters who would also return like the Bride, for example, who now lacks a real story like before , now I would find a place. Inside Coats' spooky attic and her husband, Captain C, would only live through a portrait and the ship's weather vane on top of the house and now with a better idea of ​​the actual ex-organized design whose ideas would go where they would combine both Mark Davis and Claude.

Coats' concepts come together, but the first half of the ride starts with the loading dock as the spooky experience Coates wanted and the last part with the ballroom and cemetery as the more comedic version Davis wanted. From there, all the best pieces of concept art from everyone. were compiled and used as the basis for a model version of the mansion where the attraction actually began to take its final form, allowing everyone to get a better idea of ​​what the attraction scenes would look like and began using animatronic figures based on Davis's characters. to be assembled and all of their faces were sculpted by Blaine Gibson, who had previously brought Mark Davis' concept art for the pirates to life with the bulk of all of these figures created and ready to be installed within the newly built show.

Leaving the building nco took some time to add a few more finishing touches to the concept while everything was being put together,still wanting to take advantage of some of the older ideas that everyone else had left behind, for example something like Gale Crazy's idea of ​​a pop-up ghost with the mechanical side of that. The effect is already in place. EXO just has to finalize the design and get someone to sculpt a real version of it and bam, you have another new attraction piece and that same process happened with many of the abandoned ideas that were previously just drawings like Concept X of the Ken Anderson's Hangman initially toyed with a redesign, but in the end he simply took the original version and put it in a stretch room, adding to the scene that Mark Davis had already created, including the moving bust effect that for the most part had been forgotten, it would suddenly find new life within the Portrait Gallery.

It was really the inclusion of leftover concepts like these that really gave the walk its eclectic vibe that people loved if Davis or Coates had had their way. and the attraction might be more focused on his ideas and not as random and interesting, as it turned out even Roly Crump's Museum of Weird, which had since been scrapped by Disney's new management, would still have some elements incorporated into it. the mansion primarily through certain design elements once all of these pieces were in place. X began to build a script that would reflect the new background history of attraction and decided that it would include some kind of host that would narrate each scene as it reviewed it, being one of its initial ideas that the host was a single demonic cat eye, with happy horns except for that unnatural and hideous one-eyed black head, watch out for him, he hates mortals, especially happy mortals, eventually that idea was replaced by a crow narrating the journey that most would say wasn't one of the best ideas and I've found very early soundtracks that having the Crow as the narrator, well it's really unpleasant whoever voiced it, it was almost like it was a human voicing a crow so it was like you were reading and you said caw caw, took the coward's way out of CAW and even though the Talk Raven was eventually scrapped in favor of the disembodied ghost hosts.

The actual bird can still be seen throughout the journey, presumably where he would have spoken. X would then work with voice actor Paul Frees on all of his lines for the ghost host to slowly rework. the original script in what would become the final narrative lurks at your side, an invisible ghost gently pushing you towards your carriage urging you to stay. In fact, I would encourage any haunted mansion fan to listen to the entire recording session if you have. No, since there are tons of little differences between this and what we can hear today, plus it's always fun to hear what people were saying in 1969 about how how much more time do I have oh oh that's like giving whiskey to an Indian?

You have to bless yourself. I don't even want the money today, well Paul, come on, you can't say that hashtag, nor my ghost host attack that last one. Part of me is glad we're recording that last line, it was around the same time all the other musical and audio elements of the attraction were recorded, from the iconic Gaylord Carter organ that can be heard throughout the attraction to all the effects of sound created. by Jimmy McDonald were finalized by giving the mansion its signature sound, which was as important in establishing its tone as all the images were, but one of the most important pieces of music was the song for the cemetery scene, as it was planned that the trip would end in a The musical note as pirates was the ride that would later have its famous ghost song of Grimm's grandmother written and composed by the former Atencio and Buddy Baker, who also inadvertently generated another great piece of the attraction: the busts singers, an effect they decided to include after seeing how good the singers look together as a group.

Now we're using the same effect that was previously only used for Madame Leota, where they projected each of her faces onto a bust, now with almost everything finally set up for the attraction and actual construction of her bust. scenes completed, the attraction would officially open on August 9, 1969, it's funny to think about it now, but at the time of its opening, the mention had been one of the most anticipated attractions since it had been mysteriously there for the past six years. The response when its doors opened was bigger than anything Disneyland had seen before truly solidifying it as a park favorite and that same feeling can still be seen today, over 50 years later, we honestly wouldn't know how much of an attraction it would be. everyone if it wasn't so popular since fans of the mansion have spent years researching its history to reconstruct all these abandoned concepts, especially websites like the forgotten Haunted Mansion and the Doom Buggies, which were of great help in making this video, so be sure to check it out. and while it may be sad to think about all that was left behind, good ideas for the mansion never really die, a great example of what happened just a few years later with Magic Kingdom's version of the attraction, where some more concepts For example, Claude Coates had the opportunity to redesign his façade in a more Gothic style that better suited his first half of the journey and Mark Davis was able to use some of his additional changing portraits in the form of a new scene in the They follow you with their eyes, so don't lose hope.

Disney has a tendency to reintroduce abandoned ideas and they have done so recently, who really knows what might come back into the game over the next decade anyway. Thank you all for making it to the end. This video is a little longer than normal, so I appreciate you sticking around and if you like these longer-form videos and want to see more of them regularly, you can help by supporting the channel, either directly through Patreon or getting yourself. one of our fantastic new t-shirts featuring some of the mansion fathers, a nice little way to pay tribute to some of the Imagineers behind the attraction, so with that being said don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already and you should .

See you all a little later, well there you have it, our Halloween fromage Scott, may Celeste be honored, thank you.